OAH Magazine of History
Volume 22, No 3
July 2008

Copyright ©
Organization of American Historians

Special Online Feature

Black Women, Black Power: A Historiography for Teachers

Rhonda Y. Williams

While I have already discussed numerous scholarly works that address black women, gender, and Black Power, other poignant studies exist that also explore black women’s Black Power politics and help situate their activism within a broader tradition of social protest, political thought, and cultural expression. A selective bibliography appears below.

Black nationalist politics has a deep and rich connection to black U.S. domestic and international anti-racist struggles. Scholarly works that examine black women’s critical engagement with black nationalism in the decades prior to the emergence of Black Power include Ula Yvette Taylor, “‘Negro Women are Great Thinkers as well as Doers’: Amy Jacques-Garvey and Community Feminism in the United States, 1924-1927,” Journal of Women’s History 12 (Summer 2000) as well as The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Victoria W. Wolcott in Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) examines respectability and reform, economic activism, and black nationalism. For keen theoretical assessment of black nationalism and its patriarchal underpinnings, see E. Frances White, “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African-American Nationalism,” Journal of Women’s History 2 no. 1 (Spring 1990).

For historical works, including scholarly biographies, of black women primarily in traditional black freedom organizations during the civil rights and Black Power eras, see Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965, eds., Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement, eds. Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); and Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2005). Also useful are Kathleen Cleaver, “Women, Power, and Revolution,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party, eds. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001); and The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998) edited by Joy James. The reader, which includes excerpts from Davis’ memoir, anti-racist feminist writings, essays on culture (such as the legacy of cultural nationalism), and interviews, charts the intellectual and political development of Davis who at various points in her activist life allied with SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and the Communist Party U.S.A. In her book chapter entitled “Angela Y. Davis and U.S. Third World Left Theory and Praxis” in Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), Cynthia A. Young pays particular attention to how “Davis’s early internationalist orientation impacted her domestic politics, rather than the other way around” (185).

Other studies examine black women’s feminist and radical responses to racism, sexism, poverty, imperialism, and heterosexism in the 20^th century, including during and after the Black Power era. Joy James’s Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) covers a sweep of time, starting with Ida B. Wells in the early 20^th century and ending in the 1990s. Robin D.G. Kelley documents how some black women radicalized black liberation agendas in his book chapter entitled “‘This Battlefield Called Life’: Black Feminist Dreams” in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002). Erik McDuffie spotlights the U.S. domestic and transnational struggles of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a short-lived black women’s radical organization during the Cold War era, in his essay entitled: “[A] new freedom movement of Negro women”: Sojourning for Truth, Justice, and Human Rights during the Early Cold War” in Women, Transnationalism and Human Rights, eds. Karen Sotiropoulos and Rhonda Y. Williams, A Special Issue of the Radical History Review 101 (Spring 2008). In Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), Kimberly Springer provides the first book-length analytical study on the development of 1970s’ black feminist organizations, including their confrontation with black women’s and men’s homophobia. For an example of studies that explore sexuality and the politics of reproductive control, see Simone M. Caron, “Birth Control and the Black Community in the 1960s: Genocide or Power Politics?” Journal of Social History 31 no. 3 (Spring 1998) and Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2003). Also see, Still Lifting, Still Climbing: African American Women’s Contemporary Activism, ed. Kimberly Springer (New York: New York University Press, 1999), which not only includes chapters by Benita Roth and Kristin Anderson-Bricker on the development of black feminist politics in the 1960s and 1970s, but also explores post-movement era legacies through primary sources and scholarly essays on health activism, electoral politics, prisons, the Million Man March, and workfare.

Numerous studies discuss the broad swath of black women’s resistance at the local and national levels after World War II, decades rich with social struggles for self-determination and equality. Rhonda Y. Williams’ The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004) examines low-income black women, their daily experiences, and social protest against the changing urban backdrop of public housing from the 1940s through the 1970s in Baltimore. In Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2004), Premilla Nadasen charts the formation of the National Welfare Rights Organization with an eye to its activist campaigns and internal race, gender, and class dynamics. Annelise Orleck in Storming Caesars Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Beacon, 2005) focuses on grassroots anti-poverty organizing among black women in Las Vegas, Nevada.

More historical work is needed on black women, their engagement in the Black Arts Movement, and their legacies in literature, visual art, and music. For one example, see Ruth Feldstein, “‘I Don’t Trust You Anymore’: Nina, Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960s,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005). The classic All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, eds. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith (New York: The Feminist Press of CUNY, 1982, 2003), provides a discussion of black female scholars’ creative literary and intellectual responses to white women’s racism, black men’s sexism, and homophobia. Also see, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983, 2000); Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004) by Alexis De Veaux.

Finally, for a sample of scholarship on black women and the contemporary politics of Malcolm X, see Farah Jasmine Griffin, “‘Ironies of the Saint’: Malcolm X, Black Women, and the Price of Protection,” in Sisters in the Struggle; and Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning to Think for Ourselves: Malcolm X’s Black Nationalism Reconsidered,” and Angela Y. Davis, “Meditations on the Legacy of Malcolm X,” both in Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: Anchor Books, 1992).